Farewell to Bonfire Night, farewell to the heedless celebration of ‘gun- powder, treason and plot’. Events since 9/11 have branded us all with the grim reality of religiously inspired terrorism. Play after play now seeks to dramatise the underlying causes. Who’s to say that the theatre doesn’t stand at least as good a chance as psychologists, sociologists and the rest of the pack of casting a glimmer of light in the dark? My critical colleagues certainly felt this of Edward Kemp’s treatment of the Guy Fawkes conspiracy, 5/11, a hit at this year’s Chichester Festival, and which I’m truly sorry to have missed.
To round off its Stratford ‘Gunpowder’ season of plays contemporaneous with, but not specifically about, the events of 1605, the RSC commissioned the highly regarded Donegal playwright Frank McGuinness to tackle those events head-on. McGuinness is of course far too experienced a hand to have attempted exactly that.
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